Study reveals that rap music dominates illegal downloads

SmartSeat, ticket data visualization site, found that Drake in particular is the world's current most illegally downloaded artist.

Charts, for the most-part, will always have a degree of misleading information. And just like movie and television viewership, it's hard to take account the number of users who listen to music illegally in the grand scheme of overall listeners.

SmartSeat, a nifty data-driven blog that looks harder at the true data of ticket sales and other similar statistics, has found that once illegal downloads are taken into account, one genre - far and away - is the most illegally downloaded, skewing traditional sales data. And it's Drake in particular that seems to dwarf any and all competition.

Looking at the some of the data above, the results SmartSeat finds are somewhat shocking. It's not just that rap is the most illegally downloaded of all the genres - it's absolutely crushing any and all the other fields. The next closest genre, R&B, doesn't even crack half as many illegally downloads that rap music accrued during the taken statistical time-frame.

Further data reveals that, recently, the illegal download market has been dominated by Drake and whatever Drake touches. The data chart above shows that his 2015 album If You're Reading This It's Too Late is easily the year's most illegally downloaded album, which is trailed by his collaborative partner Future's recent album DS2.